—From the chicken coops, who emerges by the pale cotton candy colored parrots…? A flock of holy spirits, like chaff in the wind, dispersed…?

—He says whatever creams your pants is gotta be fine, the food of the gods for your spirit…?

—In the background, cavernous, Patsy Cline singing that she falls to pieces…?

—He says, Gather yourself, enjoy what’s left, always what’s left…

—…pieces of china all over the floor, all those broken plates, the crowd thinking meanwhile I’m such a klutzy prestigiator…?

—Find a patch of clear in the plenilune…?

—Pedicure…? Anyway, everybody assuming I’ve got bum elbows, ok?

—Open the cellophaned package…? Don’t be abashed, you are klug genug, clever enough to know that the only eyes that matter are those of your soul, and your soul is always smiling on you…?

—Then I make believe them believe that I’m not only a wretched klutz but I’m pestered by blasts of cough and sticky phlegms of chronic catarrh…?

—Take the dildoes out, no need to concoct complicated plots like you are another silly choirboy with a Hitlerian cowlick…?

—I’m playing to the crowd, I’m pawing de carpet, like I’m looking for my truncheon, the one I’ve been using trying to balance the plates that invariable crashed and broke…?

—Pull no punches, ok? He says, And don’t worry about anything at all, if your breath reeks, if your body groans with arthritic pains, if your soul’s fagged out…, if you’ve been declared void since long ago by all your neighbors and acquaintances, if nobody’s been paying any attention to you for ages…

—Here come the parrots… At the periphery of the crowd the flock awakes, they are gray carnivorous parrots, for their weight, the more intelligent beings on earth… They clutch captive close to their puffed up chests a beating flat plastic heart that intermittently lights and fades… They are in love.

—Prime yourself like a troll, liberate your cowered outer wrappings… Shout to the moon through the clearing, become a witch, nothing healthier for ruefully encaged individual…

—The clumsy truncheon has become an elegant narrow flexible saber… The enamored parrots come to me, the parted flock of twenty, ten at every ear of me, like they are bombs I’m bombarded with…

—Fourier says, Never mind amending the classics… Toss them to the big pyre… All is church shit, inquisitorial inventions to shackle the future generations…

—Four flights of the saber, as four swats of the whizzing twig withy, two at each side, and the twenty eager parrots are decapitated on the floor, blood all over the pieces of shiny white china…

—He says, It only matters what the now obtains, what obtains the now… And Wittgenstein said the same before…? Ask the caveman if your fucking progress means to him anything but added garbage…? Bloody grating complication to a life otherwise up till now in unison with compassionate nature…?

—…the blood itself coming from the flat pouches, the fake hearts…? The pretended heads separated from the bodies the empty little bags turned inside out, looking perfectly from a distance like recently severed parrot heads…? A trim of drying blood as a necklace that slowly dissolves…?

—Don’t do another slipshod job of your single-shot life…

—Darkness overflows, suddenly following… A trill of chatty drums… Light’s back, brighter than ever, and the twenty are parrots alive and crowning me with a nimbus loaded with spiritual significance…? Touring my glorious head like I’m again the chosen figure…?

—The catalyst…

—The catalyst, you’ve got that right.

—…that changes your life, brings it back to nature, from where it had been kidnapped by the evil forces of merchant civilization…?

—In my wake, the plaudits, the applauses, probably too overwhelming to ignore… For what it’s worth, Johnny Latrina, the officiating barker, is of the opinion that it would pay to have the great Saber-Wielding Illusionist Contortionist back into stage again…

—Be unique, he says, in escaping hostility. Hostility is built in. Everybody who is born in the plagued baleful baneful rotten cage of civilization, where only the greed of the merchants matters, is burned in and for life in hostility… For hostility’s sake you are brought to the shit-pile, the merdier…?, and the more hostile the more you obey the strictures of your slave-masters…

—Yeah… But what do you think about the new act…?

—Huh…? Did you hear what I told you about the return to the cave… No holding back… Nature invading, and you part of it…?

—Yeah… But…

—No, your act is excellent, but the more it touches the freedom of the old ages, when the grotesque advent of merchant class had not happened… Probably a monstrous mutation, you know…? Listen, I’ve seen there is a contest in the big mall by the river…? All the stores getting together and offering awards to the best paintings exposed up and down the aisles…?

—Have you taken up painting now…?

—I’m becoming a fellow artist. Are you feeling threatened…? My intention is to paint fire… Just anthropomorphic images of flames… The forest consumed by the fire and the specters of all the natural people emerging, ascending… Blacks and reds…

—I’m thinking myself blacks and reds for my new uniform…? And the parrots of course such a contrasting gray…?

The “dialogue” was interrupted. Simultaneously, something or somebody (ubiquitous…?) was knocking on their very own doors… “Somebody at the door,” said both of them at the same time. “Call me!” “I’ll call you!”

Maximine was at Coralline’s door. At Chuck’s Thai, the Suze. (Have I got it wrong…?)

22.

No, I’ve got it right. In this “Epilogue of Decollation and Fire” my purpose, I purport, is to finish them all off.

Maximine in the good graces of Coralline again, Chuck humping the Suze. Willie the jackal escaping with the help of his buddies in the system, of course…

Dick, Marietska, Nina, the detective Howard… Who else…?

Ah, yes, a short moment ago, jabbering about spark plugs, the guy in the garage, giving a rose-colored fig for Maximine’s Jag. As who wouldn’t, the guy such a dedicated bloke…?

He was turning some screws and all at once reading on the sly a superior reprint of one of Bobby’s ethnic furtive mysteries — a homosexual fantasy called “Those Were the Ticks that Tickled his Fanny,” signed with a Chinese-sounding pseudonym (the Chinese being after all the folks he respects above all others…) — where a rabid Bengalese has both his goose cooked and welcomes a divine celluloidal apparition of sorts at the bottom of a ravine…, when, as the storm hit harder, the current gave up, in unison the garage’s lights went all off, and only the tinier, more concentrated glare in his spelunker’s helmet held firm…

The mechanic, whose name was Whitecheck, was told by the boss he could go home also… Whitecheck here replying that he wanted to wash a bit before, the boss, in return, before scrambling away, answering that, as he himself had locked the office, Whitecheck should make certain that he closed tight the shop also…

Meanwhile, let’s not lose sight of the suffering fellow, the smashed Bengali at the bottom of the ravine… Who, as a consequence to the many bones cracked and the accompanying fever, was heavily hallucinating…

Under the steady headlight, tittered and tottered the sweet delayed orgasm of the mechanic as his hero tonight, the Bengali shepherd, in his dry, yet searing wit, tried in his delirium to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, and the hairs in his nose, accordingly to the writer, not dissimilar to those surrounding his fragrant asshole, were tiny vibrating strings of energy… His auburn eyes saw in their fever from nine to eighteen dimensions, and myriad parallel universes were bluntly added as he lodged his complaints in frantic undercuts against the cruel faggotty face of the glowing goggly moon.

The point about who the winner of the bout would be being moot from slide or photogram number one.

Hidden behind the door, there were Whitecheck’s cloaks and daggers, and in the pocket of one of his cloaks, all alike in their shiny blackness, there was, carefully concealed, a baloney sandwich… He blithely overran a few big tanks of exhausted oil. “Big oil,” he thought, “murderous concerns creating economical models whose irresponsible expenditures exhaust the earth itself. We as humans all sullied, all dishonored as keepers or stewards of ship earth. We’ve put death before values, we’ve replaced profit motives for the reliance on the clean pristine bounties of nature… Everything has been turned into big gobs of shit, the whiff of capitalistic state terrorism…”

Before exiting from his narrow closet with his baloney sandwich, Whitecheck turned off the lantern on the brow of his helmet… Then, on the rough surface of the garage, he skillfully avoided the implements, the cans, the machines and mechanisms, the cars themselves…; tiger-like, he approached the gate… He stood on his toes, he furled back the veiling curtain; cautiously, as if afraid of a sniper, he peered through the transom… The earth in front, buffeted and tormented by the scambling dirling storm, seemed to cry in agony… The rain, tears of pain… Today the earth is raped by big oil and big cars and big planes and big armored trucks and big bombs and big shits commanding the ubiquitous rape… Quis cras ipsum volebit? — Who shall want it in the future…? It shall be discarded as a dried up, burned up, used up jalopy… Another worthless planet carbonized, not even good as scrap metal, too polluted, contaminated…

No mangy gift dog of a messiah seeing fit to unturf its eyelashes and resurrect… Probably died long ago of earth-poisoning, as a tyro, untried grub, before he could transmogrify properly even priming itself for next phase, the one that made it earthwormy enough that could allow it to climb to the fiery radioactive petrol-soaked surface…

He drew out the curtains, he went inside Maximine’s Jag, he lit his light, he unwrapped his sandwich, he opened his book, faintly reeking of spilled, spoiled kerosene, he resumed reading it (the stinking spool of a buckled book) — scrolling diligently its suffusing pastoral bliss — parsimoniously getting to the climax through steps of delicious antsy titillation — saplings of hope erupting always, or almost always, on the way, abruptly sending you back perhaps to a paradisiacal bosquet, in a persnickety onslaught on the disencumbered senses — no more cricks and inflexibilities — you are lithe as a contortionist, not groggy and scroggy and hampered by the onus of incrusted guilt — you are furthermore a-swim in a generous superfluity of seminiferous text — graciously served by that otherwise blatantly ignored great writer, the prodigiously non-notorious (how strange!) Bobby Chung Ching…

This beautiful literature rehabilitates my spirit. The scheming chemistry never slackening its grip… Paradigms of sublimation thrown tumultuously, obscene abductions of the soul, brought to welkins of unbalance above the void… Something like that, at the very least. Different paradigms making you inhabit different worlds, for sure, quite, quite…

He threw unquiet glances all around. Finally he squatted, eased the way to his cock, unfastened his fly, drilled in with his free hand… In a jiffy, sandwich and narcotics had been properly sucked up… His eyelashes, such a sissy geometry of hairs, drew closer by degrees…

The handsome Bengali shepherd’s shaky hand reached for his baggage… Down from his girdle hung a purse full of frills… Ah, but with what dismay Whitecheck read that the shepherd, whose name was Circussized (though, through some understandable shortcut of the imagination plus the careless fast spelling, Whitecheck read it as Circumcised the whole of the while,) took out from the bag a sharp shepherd’s knife.

He feared for Circumcised’s life, or else his balls…?

He was full of fervor, and ecstatic, enraptured enough, while praying mentally to the author of the scripture he held in his less active hand, that he promised that if he (the writer, or the personage, whoever held at the instant the strongest will,) if he would stay his own hand, if he’d not cross the taw line and (the writer) didn’t evict the handsome boy from the novel, and the boy wished or chose to linger, he (the reader) would stay his own also, if at least for a while, delaying longer still the agonizing orgasm…

A line of tis (palm-like trees from over there, remarked the author in a semi-learned aside) held the line against the rumble of the earthquake which had thrown the handsome shepherd down the fatal ravine… The tis flailed in the breeze like they were accoutered also with the arms of hammy actresses…

He, Circussized, had been wooing a wether, and not even the bell-wether, but a particularly fat and well fleeced wether nonetheless — not altogether unprepossessing then — when he heard the first crack of the whip ushering ominous from a crack on the angry surface of the earth itself — where every human already dead is but the amount of a little bicker of yellow dirt — and every live one but the potential little urn of ineluctably yellowing ashes — so that when the final burning comes… Whitecheck peered at the jerky hands of his wristwatch. It was getting late. He had to skip the fillers…

The wethers were all tainted, destined for meat, and meet for death, but who wasn’t… (…) A shepherd has always need of a bell-wether, and he himself occasionally has to carry the bell or the wether or both… (…) And one may indeed lie down with greasy hoggets as with wool wethers, and yet long for the smoother skin of a man — if a resurrected one still much better, imagine his maggoty skin. (Yeah, do!)

The writer hyped the whines the hard-bitten handsome mountain semi-god couldn’t stifle in his excruciating pain. With his knife, the shepherd, in his feverish delirium thinking of himself maybe as one of his dearest bucks being primed for a most famous roast, was slowly skinning himself… Chinese torture indeed… The mechanic was pumping like mad…

Old clips of dead cinema stars were crossing his mind… The old dead stars were advertising now new wares — only the words had changed — the scenes were the same — smug scenes, prescient scenes, perjured scenes…

Most of the stars were women chatting away… Center stage. (The faggy crews lost in the foggages…) One held the rudder of a yacht and blabbered about tins of fish being so good for your health… Another dead beautiful star, very contrivedly, and outrageously made up, totally incredible in her stupid role, held a bulrush fish-basket and was romping among the marooned barks… She was advertising cold-cream…

A dead magnificent very titty star had climbed over an elephant, she was under a circus tent indeed… And Circussized saw the elephant’s cock lengthen to lengths extremes, while the wooden actress announced how good and wholesome was certain brand of extremely fat condensed milk…

A highly-disliked twit of a homosexual actor (all over the world, all through the ethnicities, asked the author, have you ever seen an artist not homosexual…?) was ordered to scram by a princess in an orange and bejeweled robe a mile wide. While the twit was disappearing through one of the wings, mincingly winking to the public, the princess from her throne saw fit (out of the blue) to order also a succulent sandwich, the pride of some stinking chain of one force-feeding restaurants or other…

Rickety cynosure of the moribund Bengali, next came a-shining a bevy of laughing mute actresses whose superimposed voices acquired the whirring sizzle of another chunk of skin being slowly pulled away from his mangled body. They were sunk in a trench of the fictional first World War… It had never happened, it all (the studio-produced fabulous shebang) had belonged to a ballet in an American Musical — no first World War, nor second, nothing… The world turning silkily around… Anyway, everybody knows is common practice among women to reinvent the world when they chat away, and now they were recommending the dresses sold by a chain of dress-making barons…

As Circussized squinted at the cinema legends never quitting, eternal in the advertising of new and newer wonders, and Whitecheck squinted at the Christ-like figure torturing himself after the earth had tortured him — torture after torture after torture — as one finally snuffed it, the other finally — ah, finally, finally — came.